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Intro To Rails

Goal

To teach you Ruby on Rails we are going to use a "Real World"
example. You've decided to create a voting system for you and your
friends to play with. You've decided at a minimum, you'd like to
allow users to:

view the topics sorted by number of votes

vote on topics

create, edit, and destroy topics

You've sketched up an initial screenshot of what you want it to look like:

Meta-Goal

When you have completed today's goal of getting the basic
application online you should understand:

Requirements

Everything should be set up the night before during our
install-fest. Please ensure you have everything working before you
show up for RailsBridge on Saturday.

You can verify that you have everything working by trying this out in your terminal:

$ irb
>> 1 + 2
=> 3
>> require "active_support"
=> true
>> exit
$

If you can do that, you are probably good to go.

Working Effectively and Efficiently

We highly recommend you do the following:

Bring up your terminal and open 2 tabs:

One is for regular terminal stuffs

One will be for IRB (a.k.a. Rails console). We'll explain later.

Open your browser fresh or hide any windows you already have open.

Bring up one window with two tabs

One for this content

One for interacting with your app.

Open your text editor and don't close it.

Hide all extra applications. Turn off Twitter, Facebook, IM, and all other distractions.

By minimizing the number of things you interact with, you reduce the
amount of time spent switching between them and the context lost as
you work through the lessons. Having 50 tabs open in your web
browser gets confusing.